


Laundry

by mcicioni



Category: Rome (TV 2005)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-28
Updated: 2007-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:27:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23121706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mcicioni/pseuds/mcicioni
Summary: Someone occasionally takes care of these two men's dirty laundry.
Relationships: Titus Pullo/Lucius Vorenus
Comments: 4
Kudos: 9





	Laundry

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in 2007, and still quite like it. Hope there are still a few Rome fans around.

Silvia lives next door to her fullery, almost at the end of the Street of the Fullers in the Aventine. She had moved there after marrying Curtius Albus, who had just inherited the fullery from his father. It had taken her some time to get used to the smell of the tubs of urine where the clothes were stamped on by the feet of slave boys, the bleaching sulphur that drifted into the air and attacked eyes, noses and lungs, the thwacks of sheets and blankets being lifted and beaten, and the curses of people being scalded by hot water. Then, little by little, she had learned about the trade and enjoyed helping Albus run the business.

The fullery had done well, for a while, and Albus had taken on apprentices. The problem was that he had refused several times to pay protection money to Erastes Fulmen, and had even tried to encourage other tradesmen to do likewise. He was a big man, tall and hefty, but one morning he had been found on the floor of the fullery with both arms broken and his throat cut. Silvia had almost gone mad, and had thought about selling the business or giving it away and going back to her father's home, but her father had two other daughters and no sons, and she had three young children and one on the way. So she had taken over the fullery, and had started paying for Erastes Fulmen's protection. Now her shop is thriving, she is well-known in the street, and her children eat well and have good clothes. Washing is a smellier craft than jewellery making or carpentry, but Silvia is proud of her work: people of all kinds leave her piles of filthy sheets and tunics, and a couple of days later they return to find everything clean, neatly folded and fresh-smelling. The customers smile as they pay her, and she smiles back, having learned interesting things from their laundry, and knowing more about them than they'll ever guess.

Heavy steps come up to her doorway. A soldier: a military stride is heavy and measured, easy to identify. Silvia likes soldiers, because usually they aren't allowed to get married, which means more work for a variety of women – food sellers, whores, and washerwomen.

"Silvia?" The curtain is pushed aside. She has recognized the voice, and controls the impulse to smooth her hair and tidy up her apron. Every time Titus Pullo walks into the fullery, she draws in a little breath because if he's standing against the light he could be her husband: same size, same broad shoulders, same strong neck. Albus' eyes were brown, though, and Titus Pullo's are deep blue, and change from dark, when he's upset, to azure, when he's smiling.

"So, Caesar and the Thirteenth are back from Egypt," she says, with the usual tiny pang of regret at the toll that pregnancies and years of hard work have taken upon her face and shape. All he'll ever take from her is a cup of water, a smile and a friendly word or two.

He nods, handing her a big bundle of tunics. "They're a little …" He shrugs, knowing that she's used to old dirt and assortments of encrusted bloodstains, and that she's good at her job and will do her best for him. He looks bewildered, unsettled. All soldiers are like this when they come home at the end of a campaign. But this time it's not just the end of a campaign: Pompey is dead, Caesar has made peace with Egypt, and it looks as if the Legions won't be needed for a long time. Now legionaries must learn how to live in peacetime.

Silvia knows all this, because she listens carefully whenever the town crier announces the news, and she is glad, because civil war is bad for business as well as for daily life. But in Pullo's eyes there's something else as well as the displacement of the veteran at the end of a war. Some other loss or grief, probably: he keeps glancing around as if he were looking for something, or someone.

"Is something wrong, Titus Pullo?"

He looks at her and shakes his head. "No. Not a thing."

"You should be glad to be home. Now you have time to rest, time to think about starting a family." She flushes, hoping he won't misinterpret her words. But he looks away, mutters something under his breath, raises his hand in silent goodbye, and leaves.

One week later, Pullo comes back to collect his tunics. Silvia has personally taken care of them, removed the worst stains, and mended the biggest holes and tears. There's another man with him, obviously a brother legionary: ginger-haired, not as tall as Pullo, and not as big, but full of tightly-controlled strength. This one does not have any dirty laundry, he must have family in Rome. He does not smile, his eyes are pale, cold. He sniffs the air, looks Silvia over, inspects the fullery and taps his foot while Pullo asks Silvia about the business and her children. Pullo laughs, cracks jokes, and then glances at his friend; Silvia swallows, because for a moment she glimpses things in his face and eyes, things she is familiar with, loneliness and wistfulness and longing.

"You ready?" Ginger-hair snaps. Pullo laughs, briefly and loudly, and grins at Silvia. "I'd better go before he reminds me that I talk too much." Ginger-hair nods grimly, but the push he gives Pullo as they walk out is light, gentle. Silvia walks to the back yard and joins a slave who is hanging wet togas out to dry, but her thoughts keep running backwards and forwards between Pullo's lost expression of a week ago and his wistful eyes of this afternoon. It's none of her business, of course; he's just one of her customers, but all the same, it's a disturbing riddle.

  
  


Titus Pullo comes back to the fullery a few days after the Ides of Martius. The city is in chaos; despair, confusion, fear and conflicts fill every street and every house. Occasionally Silvia thinks back to the happier times of a couple of months ago, the murals and songs and plays about the two heroes of the Thirteenth Legion who walked out of the arena holding on to each other. These days are not the best for tradesmen and shopkeepers, and her customers are few and far between. Her children need new sandals, the stocks of sulphur are running low, and she's had to sell two slaves.

When she sees Pullo come through the doorway, alone, Silvia is pleased because he's still alive, and because he always pays promptly, and because there are many things she'd like to ask him. He is carrying a couple of his own tunics, filthy and blood-spattered, and two togas. One is a woollen white toga, like a magistrate might wear, not too dirty; the other is a senatorial toga, beautiful white wool with a crimson border and long crimson strips at the side, and with dried bloodstains all over the front, from chest to knees. His fingertips brush the fine cloth of the magistrate's toga, slowly and pensively. "When he first put it on …" he mutters to himself, and then he just stares at the cloth; Silvia looks at his lined face and at the new strands of silver in his hair, and does not ask any questions.

Pullo speaks again, to her this time. "After they're washed and dried … is there something you could put in the folds so that the moths won't eat them, like?" Silvia nods. "He told me to throw them out, but …" He shrugs, shakes his head, and sighs. Silvia knows that Lucius Vorenus won't be wearing his togas for a while: she was in the crowd that followed him three nights ago, when he stepped out of Erastes Fulmen's house, covered in Fulmen's blood, carrying Fulmen's head. She would have liked to kiss his hand for ridding Rome and the world of an evil bastard, but a glance at his face was enough to stifle any joy or gratitude, and to raise all sorts of new fears.

"Bad times ahead, Titus Pullo," she whispers, remembering the way Pullo strode right behind Vorenus, with his sword drawn, turning around every now and then to glare at the crowd and discourage anyone from expressing any disagreement with what he and Vorenus had done.

He nods slowly. "Let me know if anyone gives you any trouble," he says on his way out. Silvia hopes she won't have to, and wonders if what's worrying Pullo is the future of Rome, or his own, or someone else's, and thinks she knows the answer.

  
  


A year has gone by. Silvia has not paid any protection money since Lucius Vorenus became First Man of the Aventine Collegium; business has picked up, the fullery now has new water-pipes and a big press to smooth the clean laundry. Silvia's eldest daughter has turned fifteen and is about to be married; her youngest son, the one who never knew his father, is in his ninth spring.

Titus Pullo greets her and awkwardly hands her a small bundle: three torn children's tunics. "The children are with their aunt," he says abruptly. Whose children, Silvia wonders for a fraction of a moment; then she remembers the wagon pulling up in front of the Collegium yesterday, and the rumours spreading through the Aventine all day today. She picks up the clothes; they're covered in old dirt and blood and snot and, oh gods, semen. She almost drops them, then bites her lip and keeps quiet, and swears to herself that she'll throw them all away and replace them, and if Pullo and Vorenus say anything, she'll give them both a piece of her mind, First Men of the Collegium or not.

Both of them come to collect the clothes, walking side by side. Vorenus looks at the new tunics, frowns a little – Silvia wonders if he has only two ways of expressing his emotions, the frown and the scowl – and puts on the counter twice the sum she has asked for.

"Are your children all right, Lucius Vorenus?" Silvia hazards.

Vorenus' frown deepens. "They will be," he snaps. Pullo shakes his head at Silvia, picks up the bundle, and follows Vorenus out. Silvia walks to the doorway, leans on it and watches them. Vorenus has stopped in the middle of the street and is just standing there, bleakly looking at nothing in particular, fists clenched at his sides.

"Yes. They _will_ be," Pullo says forcefully, almost shouting. He plonks the bundle of tunics onto the nearest windowsill, faces Vorenus, seizes his face between his hands, and looks into his eyes as if he wanted to pour all his strength and trust and hope into him. "The children'll be fine." That's what he keeps saying, _the children_ , instead of _your children_. And the way he cups Vorenus' face is exactly the way Albus used to cup Silvia's, when she was sick, or worried, or upset about Erastes Fulmen. They stand like this for a long moment, then Vorenus nods once, Pullo grabs the bundle and they walk away, their shoulders bumping. Neither one looks back.

  
  


Several months pass before Pullo and Vorenus reappear. Silvia has heard that now there are women in their lives, a wife and a sister-in-law, who take care of them and wash their clothes. Anyway, she has had plenty to do: renovations to the fullery, her first grandchild, new slaves. But when she first sees Pullo, she hardly recognizes him: he looks haggard and moves slowly, as if every movement were an effort beyond his strength. His eyes are almost black and his hands shake when he gives her a woman's dress; a short, small dress, for a small, thin woman.

"Can you do it by tonight?" His usually loud, boisterous voice is quiet and rough. "I bought it for her, when I … I thought …" He stops and swallows hard. "I want her to wear it under her shroud, when I bury her."

Silvia cannot hide her shock. "Bury? No funeral pyre?"

"No." Vorenus is standing close to Pullo, a steadying hand on his back, and stares at Silvia. "We'll bury her in an open field. That's what she wanted."

Silvia washes, dries, presses and delivers the dress before sunset, all the time wondering what the gods have against these two men and what they have next in store for them. She sits on her balcony until they pass by, at first light, just the two of them, wearing dark tunics. Pullo is walking slowly, his eyes empty, the sealed black shroud small and light in his arms, and Vorenus is behind him, carrying picks and shovels, his shoulders and jaw set as usual, his pale eyes staring with angry tenderness at his companion's stiff back. Silvia sits quietly for a while, then gets up, wipes her wet cheeks, and goes down, her tread a little heavier than usual, to awaken her family and open the shop.

  
  


Two years later, Silvia is outside the fullery, instructing a new slave boy on how to look after the urine vats at both ends of the street: they must be carried to the fullery after the passers-by have filled them. The boy makes all sorts of faces, and Silvia cuffs him, not too hard. It's what they all live on, she reminds him, urine is one of the tools of their trade, and it's the only one that's free.

She hears a loud guffaw, and looks up into the amused eyes of Titus Pullo. His bearing is more authoritative, as befits the ruthless First Man of the Aventine Collegium, who had bitten off Memmius' tongue and still keeps Memmius in a cage as a warning. Silvia no longer thinks of Albus when she sees him, but can't help smiling when she realizes that he's with the three children of Lucius Vorenus. He's looked after them since their father left them and went off to Egypt with Marc Antony, the gods only know why. The children look healthy and clean, and don't seem to be pining for their real father; the older girl is wearing the white clothes and veil of an acolyte priestess, the younger girl seems to be close to marriageable age, and the boy darts here and there, not saying much, but noting what goes on in the street and the shops.

Gaia, Pullo's woman, is with them. She does not strike Silvia as the motherly, cooking-and-washing sort: she strides confidently beside her man, taking hardly any notice of the children. If Silvia had been younger, she might have felt jealous. But there is grey in her hair and she no longer has a waistline; she is a hard-working grandmother concerned about bills to be paid and urine vats to be filled. She smiles at Pullo and wishes him well, with her heart as well as with her words.

  
  


The last time Titus Pullo comes into Silvia's life is late one night, a few days after Octavian Caesar's triumph. Silvia folds a pile of clean sheets, puts them away and closes up shop, sighing because these days she tires easily. A number of things wear her out: the extra weight she keeps putting on, her daughter's husband disappearing with the next-door neighbour, and her sons refusing to take over the fullery – her elder boy is away with the Legions, the younger one wants to be apprenticed to a tailor. So a lot of responsibility still sits squarely on Silvia's shoulders, and it's a heavy load to carry alone.

Pullo must have been lurking somewhere in the alley, because one moment she is alone and the next he's at her side in the darkness.

"Salve, Titus Pullo." After the first shock, his looming presence is reassuring. Then she glimpses a foreign-looking boy who is sticking close to Pullo's other side, turning up his nose at the smells. She smiles at him, and he barely nods; maybe he's just shy, not ill-mannered.

"Silvia, we have known each other for a long time," Pullo whispers, bending down towards her. "You're someone I trust, and I'd like to …" He stops, puts his hands on her shoulders and looks at her. His touch is light, a soft prayer. "Can you do something for us? It's dangerous, but I don't know who else to ask."

_Dangerous_. Silvia has herself, two daughters and three grandchildren to look after. And Pullo is not a relative or anyone close to her. He's a customer, an ex-soldier and ex-knifeman, the former boss of the Aventine Collegium; his enemies must be as many as the grains of sand on the beach at Ostia. Of course she can't help him.

"Ask," she says firmly.

And so a little while later, in the middle of the night, her legs shaking so much that she can hardly walk, she leads the way as Pullo carries Lucius Vorenus up the stairs and into the storeroom over the fullery. Vorenus has been badly wounded in Egypt; he's as white as a bleached sheet, coughs frequently and can barely talk. And young Aeneas must remain hidden as well; both are supposed to be dead, which in Vorenus' case is not all that far from the truth. Silvia's questions are answered with "Long story," which convinces her that it's serious business – they're probably involved in murder, treason or both, and she will be tortured and killed alongside them when they're discovered. She feels sorry above all for young, amber-skinned Aeneas, who has an accent but speaks better Latin than Silvia ever will, and whose respect for both men is mixed with worry about Vorenus and puzzlement about Pullo.

Silvia orders her family to ask no questions and tell no tales if they know what's good for them, and she takes all possible precautions when visiting the fullery every night. The fullery stays closed for over a month "due to family reasons"; Pullo makes Silvia accept a generous compensation for all the lost business, overriding her fairly sincere protestations. For the fears and terrors that keep her awake every night and make her heart jump in her throat at every unfamiliar noise or step there can be no compensation, and they both know it.

Pullo is inconspicuous when he enters and leaves the fullery, but when he's at Vorenus' bedside he moves with energy and determination; his eyes are azure and shining, both frightened and happy. It's almost a week before Vorenus can sit up, two weeks before he can move a few steps, three before he negotiates the stairs; he coughs a lot, and he's always short of breath. A few times he mentions his children – _the children_ , he also calls them – and there's much he does not reveal behind the few things he does say, and Silvia wonders to what extent she should revise her earlier opinions about him.

When Vorenus regains full use of his voice, he shouts at Pullo to stop bossing him around. Pullo cheerfully ignores him, or sometimes threatens to hold Vorenus' nose if he won't drink his sleeping draught, or to tie him to the bed if he ever again gets up to try and practise stretches and lunges. They swear at each other like the old soldiers they are, yet now there's definitely something new in their friendship, something that Silvia cannot, does not want to, put her finger on. Vorenus occasionally allows himself to smile, but he seems to have two different kinds of smile. One is for Aeneas and Silvia, a little grin that smoothes the lines on his forehead and makes him look almost approachable; the other is reserved for Pullo, a smile that lights up Vorenus' eyes like a Maius morning, shows a dimple in one cheek, and takes ten years off him. Silvia tries not to notice the hint of teasing when Pullo's fingers brush the small of Vorenus' back as he helps him dress or wash, and the way Vorenus' eyes flicker to Pullo's full lips and large, capable hands.

The last morning, before sunrise, a wagon comes to the door of the fullery, with extra space under the boards, where a man and a boy can lie fairly comfortably. Before climbing in, Aeneas spontaneously hugs her and kisses her cheek; Silvia hugs him tight and wishes him a safe trip and a good life with his two adoptive fathers. Vorenus still coughs quite a bit, but he is standing opposite her as upright as if he was at parade attention before Octavian Caesar. "Thank you," he says, raggedly and intensely, and he holds her hands between his and squeezes them. Silvia hears all that's behind those two words, and squeezes his fingers back, then glances at him and sees his best smile instead of his second-best, and for a long moment she feels genuine friendship between them, warm and comforting.

Silvia knows people who sell good woollen garments at a really low price, if you don't ask where they came from, and she has made sure they have plenty of clean, plain tunics, cloaks and blankets. She and Pullo arrange them, along with sacks of flour and seed, over the secret cavity in a way that looks neither too tidy nor too haphazard. At the last minute, Pullo takes her aside and awkwardly presses something hard into her hand: "We want you to have this. Not payment. Just something to remember us by." It's an Egyptian gold ring, engraved with strange symbols, and it has a large stone, as black as the eyes of Aeneas. It was made for a much smaller finger, for a finger not swollen by lye and sulphur. Silvia finds a leather thong, threads the ring through it, and slips the makeshift necklace under her tunic. "I'll never take it off," she promises. And then she's enclosed in Pullo's arms and crushed against his chest. His rough cheek rubs against hers, and his rough voice whispers words of gratitude and praise and hope, and she feels glad and strong, and will carry these words inside her for the rest of her days, next to the memories of Albus.

Pullo climbs onto the seat, takes the reins in his right hand and raises his left hand in salute. The wagon moves off, towards the north, where the two men and the boy will join the rest of the family in the farm they have bought. They have washed away the traces of their old lives and are about to start anew, leaving behind their enemies and memories of Rome. Silvia watches the wagon disappear around the corner of the Street of the Fullers, then wipes a hand across her eyes, squares her shoulders and walks back into the fullery, the ring warm between her breasts.


End file.
